CRW Airmen deliver: How do they do it?

  • Published
  • By Col. James Copher
  • 621st Contingency Response Wing
TRAVIS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. --  It's a question that every kid asks with wonderment at some point during the holiday season: "How does Santa deliver all of those presents?"

It does seem implausible, with nothing but a few reindeer pulling a heavy sleigh thousands of miles through the dark of night. But when I think of the complex missions the 621st Contingency Response Wing has executed, I realize that anything is possible when you have a team of dedicated professionals determined to get the job done.

It's with great pride and amazement that I continually look across the 621st CRW's four mission sets at Airmen who've consistently delivered precise air mobility effects to the point of need. How do they do it?

Our Air Force is evolving to meet the challenges of a complex and interconnected world. In an effort to meet those demands, the Air Force's strategy for the next 30 years postures an Air Force that is agile and inclusive. In the Air Force Chief of Staff's strategic framework, "A Call to the Future," the need for strategic agility is at the institutional level on how we organize, train, equip, and employ our Air Force.

Strategic agility and the need to employ airpower in the future naturally leads to a need for operational agility. The Air Force Future Operating Concept states:  "Operational agility is the ability to rapidly generate - and shift among - multiple solutions for a given challenge."  

The key tenets of the Air Force strategy -- agile and inclusive -- and the Air Force Future Operating Concept -- operational agility -- are evident at the 621st CRW. Unlike our mobility aviation missions, the conditions for employment of contingency response forces are so varied due to the changing circumstances in the air and on the ground, the CRW has been built to represent the path to operational agility.

The organization's design to meet a 12-hour global response time, comprised of more than 50 tailorable unit tasking codes, with a manning document representing all the capabilities that comprise one response to world crises give the CRW maximum agility and its customers an unrivaled capability delivered through four distinct and integrated lines of effort. Those four include theater-wide command and control executed by its Air Mobility Operations squadrons, building partner capacity through engagements performed by the Mobility Support Advisory squadrons, providing mobility expertise directly at the point of need with embedded air mobility liaison officers, and contingency response forces who open, operate and close bare airfields for mobility operations around the world. The ability to rapidly generate and shift among multiple solutions is what the CRW provides to the entire mobility enterprise.

When mobility aircrews taxi onto a ramp at a remote location, it's been operationally proven that the CRW's inclusive mission sets converge to deliver them there: the MSAS establishes and develops the mobility relationship with the host-nation; the AMOS provides the en route and theater-wide C2; the AMLO advises and assists intraservice air, ground and amphibious assets on mobility needs; and a cross-functional team of CR forces with a lean footprint provides port, command and control, logistics, maintenance and security to a robust degree. CRW Airmen are trained to rapidly generate and offer a combatant command the flexibility to shift solution sets anywhere in the world, under the worst locations, in the dark of night, at locations no one has heard of. The CRW's capabilities are AMC's operational agility by design.

Over the last year, the sun has never set on the 621st CRW. We've operated 24/7 from all corners of the globe. I'm proud to say this year's numerous deeds earned our Devil Raiders an Air Force Outstanding Unit Award for exceptionally meritorious service, but more importantly, they earned the respect of our nation and the continued trust of our mission partners who continue to build the global response network with us.

So just like Santa, when our Airmen say they will deliver, they mean it.